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The Party of "No"

Technorati and Me

Technorati is indexing me again! They had to make a code change to fix
the problem with my blog getting stuck in their queue. Kudos to Eric M.
and the guys at
GetSatisfaction.com
where they have "community powered support for Technorati".

Well, they're "sorta, kinda" indexing me anyway. It's on a 24 hour tape
delay or something. So I never get picked up by Memeorandum because they
pull from Technorati and Technorati has stuff I posted yesterday
listed as my latest blog entry. And that's old news to Memeorandum.

Wankers.

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Since 1930, electric clocks have kept time based on the rate of the electrical
current that powers them. If the current slips off its usual rate, clocks run
a little fast or slow. Power companies now take steps to correct it and keep
the frequency of the current - and the time - as precise as possible.

The group that oversees the U.S. power grid is proposing an experiment would
allow more frequency variation than it does now without corrections, according
to a company presentation obtained by The Associated Press.

Those corrections take effort, and the amount of effort needed is growing more
complex every day. Which seems counter-intuitive because he power grid has run
at 60 cycles per second for more than 80 years. They should know how to keep
it that way by now! So what changed?

Green power, that's what. It's a whole different kettle of fish than the older,
legacy (aka fossil fuel, nuclear, or hydro-electric) systems. And there's more
and more of it being connected to the grid every day.

In the future, more use of renewable energy from the sun and wind will mean
more variations in frequency on the grid. Solar and wind power can drop off
the grid with momentary changes in weather. Correcting those deviations is
expensive and requires instant backup power to be always at the ready.

Hmmm, so does that mean all this new-fangled green energy stuff is less
reliable? Why yes, yes it does.

Hence the need to test the effects of allowing the frequency to fluctuate.

No one is quite sure what will be affected. This won't change the clocks in
cellphones, GPS or even on computers, and it won't have anything to do with
official U.S. time or Internet time.

But wall clocks and those on ovens and coffeemakers - anything that flashes
"12:00" when it loses power - may be just a bit off every second, and that
error can grow with time.

The North American Electric Reliability Corp. runs the nation's interlocking
web of transmission lines and power plants. A June 14 company presentation
spelled out the potential effects of the change: East Coast clocks may run as
much as 20 minutes fast over a year, but West Coast clocks are only likely to
be off by 8 minutes. In Texas, it's only an expected speedup of 2 minutes.

Some parts of the grid, like in the East, tend to run faster than others.
Errors add up. If the grid averages just over 60 cycles a second, clocks
that rely on the grid will gain 14 seconds per day, according to the
company's presentation.

This will be an interesting experiment to see how dependent our timekeeping
is on the power grid, said Demetrios Matsakis, head of the time service
department at the U.S. Naval Observatory, one of two official timekeeping
agencies in the federal government.

I guess it's time to break out those sundials again. They'll be more accurate
than the alarm clock next to my bed. And best of all they're powered by a
kind of renewable energy which thankfully isn't dependent on the power grid.
Yet.

That's green energy for you. Less reliable, more expensive, and a potential
cause of nationwide inconvenience. What's not to like?